Tech Won't Save Us - Facebook Is A Battleground w/ Avi Asher-Schapiro and Maya Gebeily

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Maya Gebeily to discuss how Facebook isn’t fully enforcing its ban on conversion therapy in Arabic, what that means for LGBTQ people in Arabic-speaking countries, and how social media has become a battleground.Avi Asher-Schapiro is a journalist covering technology for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Maya Gebeily is the Middle East Correspondent at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Follow Avi on Twitter as @AASchapiro and follow Maya as @GebeilyM.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Avi and Maya wrote about how Facebook is letting conversion therapy posts continue being shared on the platform in Arabic.Maya wrote about social media companies blaming glitches for disappearing posts about Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.In September, Buzzfeed published an internal letter by Sophie Zhang on how Facebook was ignoring its impacts on the politics of countries around the world. Zhang has gone on to to do work with The Guardian and Rest of World.The United Nations says conversion therapy “may amount to torture” and should be banned.Lebanon provides more freedom for LGBTQ people, but there are still barriers.Saudi Arabia infiltrated Twitter to identify dissidents, and in 2020 convicted a Yemeni blogger for supporting gay rights.In September 2020, Algerian police arrested 44 people for attending a “gay wedding,” using the decoration as evidence against them.Israeli security agencies work to ensure Facebook censors Palestinian content at their request.Support the show

Social media has actually become a battleground. It's not just a tool that activists can use, it's a tool that governments, militias, other malign actors are also very much willing to use. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Avi Asher Shapiro and Maya Jibeli. Avi is a journalist covering technology for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Maya is the Middle East correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In this week's episode, we talk about a recent investigation they did into Facebook's enforcement of its ban on conversion therapy posts in the Arabic language. They found that in many cases, these posts are still active.

People who promote conversion therapy are still able to post on Facebook and didn't even know that there was a ban in place. When Avi and Maya contacted Facebook and showed them examples of these conversion therapy posts still being active on the platform. They did take some of those posts down, but this is a clear example of how Facebook's content moderation policies are not living up to what it says. And as a result, you know, there are people who are on the ground, you know, LGBTQ people in the Middle East and North Africa who are not only falling for what these conversion therapists are selling, but can also face really real world consequences when they are outed or when people around them are influenced by these posts by these conversion therapists, and then seek to act on what they've been told if they find out that, you know, a person they know is LGBTQ. I had a great time

speaking with Avi and Maya. And I think you are really going to like this conversation. I think it's really insightful, and it's about a really important topic. Just a quick note before we do get into this episode that we are talking about conversion therapy. So there are some things that Avi and Maya described that are quite heavy about the things that some of these people have experienced through conversion therapy or because of things that happened on social media. So I just want you to be aware of that. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about the other shows in the network at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you are a fan of newsletters, Tech Won't Save Us also has a new

newsletter called The Hammer that comes out every Sunday, and you can find out how to subscribe to that in the show notes. If you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and make sure to share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. Every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is provided free to everyone because those of you who can support the show choose to do so. If you want to support the work that I put into making Tech Won't Save Us every week, you can join supporters like Laura, Ray Tamalti in Montreal, and Alicia Kenworthy in Washington, DC by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Maya and Avi, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much, Faraz.

I'm really excited to talk to you both because you have this really interesting story that was published by the Thomson Reuters Foundation about, I guess, some of Facebook's content moderation practices in the Middle East and particularly around conversion therapy posts in Arabic. And so I think that this also touches on some broader issues around Facebook, around content moderation and around these issues. So before we get into the investigation, I wanted us to get some context on some of these issues before we dig in. So I wanted to start by asking, you know, what is conversion therapy and how did Facebook come to place a ban on it on its platforms or at least claim to ban it? You know, how did that happen? Yeah, so conversion therapy really refers to a really broad range of practices broadly that try to change people's sexual orientation. And it's an interesting topic because, you know, they range from these kind of heinous scenes of physical abuse, electric shock therapy of people who are homosexual to what sounds like more gentle practices of, you know, well, if people want to have different sets of attractions, then here are some mental exercises they could do. But, you know, experts have warned people who study this that this really can amount to torture. If you're queer and you're being pressured or forced or abused into trying to change or even hiding your preferences, it they've been banned in a number of Western countries and in some states in the US, they're considering ban. So about a year ago, you know, a number of kind of LGBTQ rights organizations were trying to raise the temperature on this and really isolate the people who offer these services and turn them into pariahs. And they turned up the

temperature on Facebook, where a lot of these people were finding customers and posting content. And I think it was about almost exactly one years ago in July, you know, Facebook, the pressure got to them and they went public and they said, OK, anyone engaged in conversion therapy on our platform? That's tantamount to hate speech, basically bringing their policies in line with what human rights groups and LGBT rights groups had been saying for years. So that's sort of, you know, the background in terms of what conversion therapy is and how at least Facebook is related to it. Yeah, no, I appreciate that context. And I think it provides us an important entry point into this conversation, right? Because, you know, conversion therapy is sometimes associated with these phrases like pray the gay away or something like that. But it can go much further than that, right? As you've described there, to even go to the point where it's considered by some organizations to be akin to torture, right? And, you know, there

are stories about people who have undergone these things having severe kind of mental distress, mental health issues that persist into their lives after that. And I think that we've seen in recent years, a number of countries looking at banning or restricting these practices. And so I guess it doesn't surprise you to see that Facebook would try to do something like that as well, or at least claim that it is trying to ban these practices. And so another piece of context that I wanted to get before we get into your investigation was also the state of LGBTQ rights in the Middle East. So what is the state of that right now? And are conversion therapy practices also common in these countries?

Yeah, I think it's important to say right off the bat that while obviously there are broadly conservative societies across the Middle East and North Africa. There is a range. So you've got a range of freedoms depending on the country, depending on the specific penal code that we're talking about, depending on kind of how liberal those societies are, et cetera. And it's not just tied to religion. I think often, particularly kind of in the conversations that were circulating online after the piece came out, a lot of people were saying, oh, well, it's because of Islam

and it's because these countries are Muslim and that's why there's so much backlash against gay communities. But actually you've also got, I mean, in Lebanon, for example, where I'm based now, you've got a significant Christian minority that is just as bigoted and then has just the same kind of problematic views

that you would have in possibly a conservative Muslim family. Beirut at the same time, it's on one end of the spectrum, as I would say, probably the most liberal city for LGBTQ individuals. It's broadly seen as the freest, it's the least restrictive, you've got gay bars, you've got drag shows. And there were a lot of conversations that I've had with LGBTQ activists in other parts of the region, they often kind of, they always kind of start off the conversation with, just so you know, we're not Beirut. So there's always kind of that aspiration. But even here, there is still within the penal code, an article that bans unnatural sex acts. And depending on the judge that you are brought to, they may consider that a gay couple is engaging in unnatural sex acts. You've still got raids on bars, etc. And then kind of you can move down that spectrum. There are other countries where, you know, being even, let's say, the example of Algerian police last year, raided what they called a gay wedding. And they assumed that

because of the colors and the type of attire that was at this party that they were attending a wedding of gay men. And so they rounded up everybody at this wedding and threw them in jail and also convicted them for being gay. A Saudi court last year also sentenced a Yemeni blogger to jail for posting online in support of LGBTQ rights. So you've got that whole range there. So that's kind of on the official level. What I didn't know, and I will readily admit this, and what I learned in the reporting of this piece is how prevalent conversion therapy practices seem to be in countries in the Middle East. And in particular, I think what we found a lot of the content was from Egypt. I guess now as they try to kind of be a little bit more, let's say, palatable, it's often couched in this language of psychological

help, if you're not feeling okay, if you don't feel like yourself, if know, if you're going through a period of transition, and you think that you may be attracted to somebody to a manner of moment, then come to this center and get some help. So it's less, let's say, violent or abusive in the language. But the end result is it's just the same once they actually get into those sessions. Yeah, I really appreciate that context, and especially drawing out how, you know, it's not just one way all across the region, things are not completely the same. And, you know, your point about it not just being Islam, you know, I know it's not North Africa, but, you know, there's often reporting on countries like Uganda, where, you know, it's very Christian, but it's also very anti-gay. And, you know,

you have people from the United States going over and trying to influence the direction of things. And I think when you talk there about a lot of this conversion therapy material coming out of Egypt, that seems really interesting to me, especially when you consider in the past number of years, how much the government under President Sisi has been cracking down on LGBT, you know, queer people in Egypt as well. And so I want to shift to your story and your reporting and what you actually found. And so it looks specifically at these posts about conversion therapy that are published in Arabic, right, not in English. So is Facebook truly enforcing that global ban on posts about conversion therapy? What did you find in this investigation? I think it really depends on what you mean by enforcing that global ban on posts about conversion therapy. What did you find in this investigation?

I think it really depends on what you mean by enforcing. You know, the way the reporting process worked for us is we were in touch with a number of organizations across the region who work on LGBTQ plus rights. And, you know, their hands are quite full. As Maya was saying, we're dealing with countries where police are raiding bars, we're dealing with the criminalization of pro-queer speech on the internet in the Gulf. And so what we were hearing from them was that although they knew this ban was in place, conversion therapy was a major vector of threat for them. But it was just like trying to even see the extent to which Facebook was taking these posts down or monitoring it was like, it was too much, you know, just given the load they had in terms of doing their best to

protect the queer communities there. So we decided to sort of poke at it a bit and see. And I think what we found was that basically, no, I mean, there's major conversion therapists operating completely freely on Facebook in Arabic. These are people who are not hiding in weird corners of Facebook. They're not people who are using pseudonyms. They're people who are bragging about having invented cures for homosexuality and then operating verified pages on Facebook with millions of followers. So in that sense, it's hard to say that the ban was enforced in any meaningful way. But it is also true that when we got in touch with Facebook and pointed out a couple of instances of really egregious specific posts where people were clearly promoting conversion therapy, Facebook came back to us and said, okay, you're right, you got one and took it down. Right. So it would be a stretch to say they're enforcing it, but they do have these rules and they do

claim to be enforcing it. Right. Yeah. I think going through that list was really interesting. I mean, Avi was able to get his hands through activists on this database that they had compiled of conversion therapy content, more than half of it on Facebook, and then some of it as well on YouTube supposedly a kind of a mental health center or some kind of psychological support center. And so they would list conversion therapy as one of a series of services that was offered there, right alongside things like drug addiction, recovering from pedophilia. And that was, I mean, the fact that they were categorizing it in that way is already problematic right from the get-go, even if there's not kind of, again, that violent language. Putting it there, it's kind of a psychological disorder akin to, you know, there are also pedophiles or, you know, drug dealers that are, you know, right next door. That's problematic in and of itself. But there were

also some pretty, I mean, some posts that I just found shocking, you know, going through and translating them from the Arabic. There was one post that was, again, posted after the ban was put in place. And I think I just checked to see if it was still up because the first time Facebook said they took it down, it had not been taken down. And I think at this point, it finally has been. But it basically said that parents that think that their kids are gay should find a way to correct this immediately. And I quote, if he insists on his position as a homosexual deviant, it's best to contact the state authority. You know, again, given the context that we just gave, contacting a state authority will almost inevitably mean that that individual gets put into jail, that individual becomes vulnerable to

abuse and a whole range of other issues. And I'm not going to continue to read it because I don't want to promote the ideas that were in that post, but they encourage, you know, detaining them and then encourage praying, etc. So, you know, detaining them and then encourage praying, etc. So, you know, there's some really problematic posts that a parent searching online to find out what to do if they think their kids are gay are going to come across this and maybe find that to be, you know, the right track to go on. Yeah, you know, what you're describing there really demonstrates how it's not just going to some like therapy session, you know, which would still be bad. But you know, there are suggestions for things that could have much more severe consequences in the lives of these people. That was kind of my next question in terms of when these

posts are placed online, and when they they are allowed to kind of persist. And you know, you talk in the story about how some of these people promoting conversion therapy have like a lot of followers, a lot of people who are following their posts. What effect does this have on LGBTQ people in the Middle East who stumble upon this content? And, you know, on the other side of this, does it influence the views of non LGBTQ people about, you know, them and what should be done to them if it's found that someone they know is gay or queer or whatever. I had the unfortunate privilege of like watching a lot of this content to see what was being discussed in Arabic. And one of the chats that had been organized by somebody who claims to be an Egyptian therapist, Dr. Osam Wasfi, he was hosting a Zoom chat that

was basically targeted at people who think their friends may be gay. So what to do if you think your friend might be gay? And he is encouraging them basically, you know, to be open to your friends, make sure that they feel that they can come talk to you. So when your friend comes to tell you that he's gay, you should tell him that you're one of us, don't worry. Then what happens? Then he becomes one of you, he becomes straight. That's the kind of advice that these conversion therapists are giving to young Arab individuals who are potentially seeing this happen around them. So we saw that as a major issue. And obviously, I mean, the impact, Avi talks to a lot more of the activists than I did. So they seem to

be very clearly impacted. So I'll turn it over to Avi for that one. As Maya said, there's a subtle, to some degree, but also very pernicious impact of this kind of content. I mean, I spoke to a number of young men in Egypt who kind of narrated to me their own experiences with this. And, you know, it's not a straight line. Obviously, these are complicated things. But, you know, fundamentally, they went on the Internet as young men feeling confused and kind of scared about discovering their sexual orientation and were shunted towards people who encouraged them to change and people who were representing themselves as medical professionals, people who represented themselves, as Maya said, as caring about them, you know, and I spoke to people who that ended up leading them down the path of being in a clinic somewhere, being treated for this. And that can start online. I think we don't want to be too deterministic about these kinds of things. I mean, as Maya was saying earlier, there are complicated conversations about LGBTQ issues in these countries, and there are passionate views about it. But I think

fundamentally, this content was doing its work of nudging people towards these very harmful practices. And we spoke to people who were on that pipeline. And as Maya said, the parenting part was another part of it. You had parents going on the internet, on Facebook, maybe starting out sort of open-minded and seeing like, oh, there exists a community of experts, of mental health experts, well-credentialed people who seem to say that this is a curable thing, this is a disease. And so the existence of those posts helped to bolster that impression as well. Did you find that the prevalence of this content or the impact of this content or the enforcement against it differed in different countries across the region? Or did you find not much difference there?

So the enforcement thing is really, really hard to get to the bottom to fundamentally, because Facebook just is not transparent about what's going on here, right? Like, we know that when it comes to sort of hate speech, often what ends up happening all around the world is that the work is sort of outsourced to organizations that care about it and monitor it, right? You'll see, for example, in the US, there are these groups that have significant resources and are really committed to trying to root out conversion therapy. And so they are on Facebook, they're sending them emails, they're haranguing them. And that does lead to more action. In the Middle East, you know, we have overburdened organizations, you don't have as much of an infrastructure for this, people are underground, in some cases. Some of the groups we talked to in Egypt were, you know, people couldn't even be public about the work they do because of how dangerous it is. that's determined to some degree upon the resources of these organizations, which has a,

ironically, the places that need kind of the most care are the ones that get the least attention in a certain way. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You were talking about the groups who then themselves have to respond to this. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that they identify these posts and the ways that they seek to get them addressed and kind of, you know, the organizing and the monitoring that they have to do in order to try to address this content that is obviously causing really real world harm. For that, I would say like the database of content that we got our hands on. I mean, literally, this is like a guy who saw his own conversion therapist thriving on Facebook,

you know, this activist named Taha Metlawi, who is based in France and is Egyptian and is an LGBTQ rights activist. I mean, he literally just was subjected to conversion therapy when he lived in Egypt, was concerned about what would happen to other people and just kind of watched as this woman, Heba Kotopu, who had practiced conversion therapy on him, began to become a star on Facebook. And he just, you know, he's a young guy. He just helps run this group by himself. In his free time, basically started just looking and making a list because of how horrified he was about what he was finding. So this is not a formal situation, right? Like this is not a situation where we have like a

check and a balance where we have like people who go into the office and like help Facebook keep conversion theory. We're talking about this falling on the shoulders of some, I mean, this guy's a refugee, right? Some of the most vulnerable people in the world. And this is the guy who's keeping tabs on conversion therapy on Facebook. So if that gives you a sense of what's going on here, it is someone like Taha, it's falling on his shoulders. And just to add two, two quick things here. I managed to interview Hiba Khutub and I asked her about this ban. And if she had ever received any kind of warning from Facebook, if any of her posts had ever been taken down, if she was even aware that a ban existed. And her answers were no to all three of those questions.

So what you have, I mean, you have the activists themselves who are being obviously, you know, who are saddened, triggered, shocked, upset. You know, when they see that these therapists are, again, thriving on facebook and that these posts are continuing kind of to be spread out untouched and the therapists themselves who were completely unfazed who haven't even heard that there was a ban so that disparity as well was quite shocking and just one other point that i wanted to add here is that in several other interviews for kind of other stories a lot of career activists especially in north africa were describing kind of social media as just not a safe space for them anymore. And there was a huge sense of disappointment. The references that they would often make were to campaigns of forced outing, where an account from even outside of the country that they were from,

somehow got information about them, or even made up information about them, posted it online, on Instagram, on Twitter, Facebook, especially because of its kind of wide use across the region. And whether or not it's true, that immediately flips into real life consequences. It means that people get kicked out of their homes. It means they get bullied in the street. It means that when they go to the police station to report the bullying in the street, they get put in jail by the police. So there's kind of this increasing, they get put in jail by the police. So there's kind of this increasing sense that I got that a lot of these activists and just even people who are not activists, even people who are just regular individuals, are feeling increasingly threatened online. It's a real double-edged sword. We published a piece a year ago about this problem of targeted harassment campaigns, outing, and violence directed at

queer Arabs on Facebook. And it is a major problem to the extent that a bunch of groups got together and sort of wrote a letter to Facebook saying, can you please spend a little bit more time reviewing these posts? You know, when we're flagging them for abuse, when someone says they've been outed, we feel that when we flag these posts, you know, they're just going into a void. That's been a complaint for a long time. And on the other side, though, I mean, you know, these are also places where people do find community and convene. And it can perhaps be the only place they might be able to meet other people like them if you live in an isolated community or you're afraid to be out in public. So it can be a real rock and a hard place for people. They kind of need to be on Facebook to a certain extent to maintain that community, but it's becoming a place with so much

harassment and so little protection that people are kind of forced to subject themselves to this dynamic, I think, which can be really hard. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, especially on the, it being a double-edged sword where you can find community, but you know, you also risk being outed or risk other kinds of consequences that might come of that. And I mean, it's I just want to say it's really concrete. Like I spoke to a guy a year ago for another story who like literally people found his Facebook page that had a rainbow flag in the background and began posting it on other pages as a sort of hit list of local people who are gay and he was beaten up outside his work, you know, and he was flagging

these posts to Facebook in the meantime, saying, I'm being targeted in this way. And he never got a response. This stuff is real, right? I mean, it can be a real emergency in people's lives. Absolutely. What you're describing there, it brings to mind a story that was published, I think it was in BuzzFeed last year. And it was an internal letter by someone who was, I wouldn't say content moderator, like it was higher than that level, who essentially said that, you know, when it came to social media being used to disrupt elections or other aspects of society in countries around the world, Facebook really only cared if it was happening in a country that the Western media

would be paying attention to and would be kind of interested in stories in. And I wonder if you feel that that is an issue that's going on here, where this is something that, you know, the Western media wouldn't pick up on, or might not pick up on, obviously, you have reported on it. But that leads Facebook, you know, I guess, to dedicate less resources to addressing this, like very serious problem. I think you hit the nail on the head. And that kind of brings us into the broader debate on content moderation and how it can vary quite dramatically based on language. There was other reporting that I had done earlier this year, just as protests were kicking off in Jerusalem over the possible eviction of Palestinian families from some homes in Sheikh Shara and East

Jerusalem. And there were posts on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram about Sheikh Jarrah that were suddenly disappearing. The accounts were being suspended. The posts were no longer visible. And that has really snowballed into a much, much bigger debate about content moderation in the Arabic-speaking world. And what these activists are now, they're kind of pulling all of these issues together. And they're saying, you know, on the one hand, you're deleting posts that are not explicitly harmful, and you refuse to explain to us why kind of addressing big tech. That's on the one hand. And on the other hand, you're refusing to address posts that do actually form a threat

to our well being. So what's what's the issue here? Why are you not taking down harmful posts, but you are taking down things that are a form of free expression? So it's, I think we're really coming into a moment where people are just hammering a lot of these big tech companies for that particular hypocrisy. Yeah, I think one of the issues here is that content moderation at scale, this scale is really hard. And so these companies end up, you know, directing their resources to certain places and certain issues where the cost to them for getting it wrong are higher. So yeah, as the sort of Sophie Zhang memo that I think came out in BuzzFeed showed,

like Facebook looked away at sort of political manipulation and countries that were not major sources of concern for them. And I think we're seeing that with what we're writing about as well. Right. I think one of the things that was striking for me is a contrast when we were reporting this story is this was at a time when Facebook was actually getting a lot of praise in the U.S. for kind of getting its hands around COVID-19 misinformation. Right. Like they had kind of seemed to figure out a way to sort of anytime someone was saying something untrue about COVID, they would sort of bombard them with like CDC information. And I'm sure if all of us were on Facebook at the time, we would see, we would go around and like anyone posting about vaccines, anything having to do with COVID, there'd be like

all these automated alerts being like, here's the truth. Here's the truth. Look, you know, listen to the doctors. And they were getting praise for it. They were really like putting a lot of effort into, in English, making sure that COVID-19 misinformation was kind of getting beaten back. And that was because the stakes were so high for them, right? With public opinion, with political pushback. And what I heard from people when we were reporting our story is a kind of jealousy almost to a certain extent, like, wow, wouldn't it be nice if people encouraging families to subject their children to gay conversion therapy was kind of considered as a public health threat in the same way that vaccine misinformation is. And kind

of looking wistfully at those alerts being put in English on the vaccine content being like, wow, wouldn't it be nice if we had that kind of backup? And I kind of understood that sense of being a second class Facebook citizen. But on the other hand, you know, these are billions of posts are being posted every day on these websites. They're using automated, massive AI with machine learning to detect and enforce their rules. They've got moderators across the world. We don't know how many of them speak Arabic.

I mean, this content is being thrown into a churning machine and trying to figure out why it was treated one way or not the other way. When Facebook won't tell you why, I mean, it is really a guessing game to a certain extent. But the impacts are clear, right? The impacts are quite clear. Yeah, I completely agree with what you both said. And I wanted to pick back up on Maya's point as well, especially around this kind of how you can see that if Facebook is concerned about a certain kind of content, even if it's in the Middle East,

it can act on that, right? I wonder if you could tell us a little bit of content, even if it's in the Middle East, it can act on that, right? I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about, you know, what happened, you know, with the posts that Palestinians were making around, you know, the recent Israeli aggression and bombing in Gaza, but also in Jerusalem. And, you know, what that kind of shows us about Facebook's content moderation decisions around these issues. Absolutely. It started out in the beginning of May. It was actually before any of the kind of bombing and the actual kind of larger scale conflict had broken out. So it was when you had Israeli security forces that were coming through and

threatening these Palestinian families, even as the court case was going with possible eviction from homes that they lived in for more than 100 years. And so you had a lot of Palestinian activists who were, you know, who were on the ground, who were tweeting, but you also had people all around the world who were taking to Twitter and posting about Sheikh Jarrah, which is the name of this neighborhood. And some of them using the hashtag, some of them not, some posting videos, some not, using different platforms.

And the weird thing that was happening was that across Instagram and Facebook, as well as Twitter, people's posts related to this particular issue were being taken down. And two other kind of activism related issues as well. But this was the one that was kind of that seemed to be the most widespread. And Instagram came through about 48 hours later and said, OK, we understand that there has been some kind of a technical glitch related to a scheduled update that we had planned for re-shared posts on Instagram. We apologize for those who had lost their content. We're reinstating that content. Twitter provided no such explanation. They just stuck to a very, you know,

one line statement that they shared with us that it was due to a technical glitch. So, you know, on the one hand, they both come out, they came out, they tried to get this explanation, but the data rights activists were absolutely unsatisfied. I mean, to them, it provided no clarity on why these posts had been taken down, why a technical glitch would affect these different platforms at the same time over the same issue. And the third complaint that they had as well was that even after the apologies came out, or even after the explanation about the glitch came out, posts were still being deleted and accounts were still being suspended. This turned into a much, much bigger issue

when the actual violence on the ground broke out between Gaza and Israel. And it kind of turned into a much bigger content moderation issue where you had posts related to the Al-Aqsa Mosque that were being taken down because they had the word Al-Aqsa in them, which had been banned by Facebook or kind of flagged by Facebook as terrorism-related material. So it just kind of ballooned into this much bigger content moderation issue. And when I went back to a range of these companies, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others to ask about their policies, you know, they were, you know, they could provide a very, very long list of what kind of mechanisms they use.

They often kind of tried to stress the point that they use both machines and humans. They have content moderators in a range of languages, and they tried to do the best that they can to inject nuance into that process. What they really were not willing to be clear about is those initial questions about what technical glitch exactly had caused those first deletions and what they're planning on doing to improve that moderation. Because as far as we can all tell, kind of out here as users of these platforms, there is a problem, but they're not being forthcoming about what processes,

what internal checks they're going to be doing to improve that process. Yeah, you know, I think that was really a situation where the inequity in content moderation and how that's applied was really very, very visible. And I was curious, you know, you described there how this was in the case of Palestinians posts, this was very clearly an issue that was not just on Facebook, but across Instagram, on Twitter. And as you mentioned earlier, these conversion therapy posts are also going on YouTube and other platforms. Do you find that when it comes to conversion therapy, is Facebook the main place that this happens? Or do you find that this is

also an issue on other social media platforms as well, to the same degree? Or is it a little bit different? Based on that database that Avi had originally gotten his hands on, Facebook made up the majority of those posts out of the 50 posts that were included in that database. It was more than half of them were on Facebook. Whereas, I think maybe we can draw the line as what kind of content we're talking about.

When it comes to this kind of purely kind of societal content where you've got people sharing something personal, not necessarily political, advertisements as well related to this content, they're much more willing to go on Facebook first. And then when you've got an activism related issue that has garnered also a lot of international attention, it definitely kind of seeps out into the other platforms. Across the Arab world, across the Arabic speaking world, Facebook is definitely the platform of choice. It's Facebook. It's kind of all the Facebook owned, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. And Twitter is definitely less used.

So I think that's probably why we've been talking so much about about Facebook and less about the other platforms. Yeah, just to add to that, I also think there's something to do with the way that the platform is structured. Right. I mean, there are a lot of conversion therapy videos on YouTube, for sure. And, you know, maybe that's a vein for future reporting. But what was striking to me, at least about the way that it was allowed to operate on Facebook is the way that these kind of operate is like not just like megaphones for content, but they're sort of like business accounts, right? Like these people are using their Facebook accounts in a million different ways. They're making live videos. They're promoting Zooms. One of the conversion therapists that Maya spoke to even said, I've got a team

of underlings who field requests through my own Facebook page and I help connect them with conversion therapy. So like Facebook is serving like a lot of different functions that like someone's YouTube account, although, you know, you can definitely get go viral on there. These are sort of like a multi purpose platform for a conversion therapist to do all sorts of things, spread their message, transact, do business, get new customers through events, you know, there was RSVPs for events, zoom events that were conversion therapy would be discussed and promoted. So in that sense, Facebook is, you know, kind of a unique player, and uniquely potentially pernicious when it comes to this kind of thing.

Yeah, I think that's a really great point. And I think it really kind of illustrates why Facebook is so important in this conversation, right? Another thing that really stood out to me as I was reading your report, especially as I was thinking about the history of these platforms. You know, when we go back to the Arab Spring, and how the social media companies really use the way that they were utilized by people taking part in those demonstrations to say, like, you know, we are bringing freedom to countries, you know, we are bringing liberation, we are giving people the tools to kind of challenge and escape these oppressive structures. And then we we look at how they have evolved, and how they are enabling these

really negative practices, you know, you described how Facebook can be a place where these people can be outed and then face physical abuse, or even worse than that. Do you think about those platforms in that kind of historical light as well, as you are seeing how they've developed and, you know, what actual impact that they're having today on some people in, you know, these Arabic speaking countries? Yeah, I mean, so I was pulling up, before we got on this chat, I was pulling up sort of what Zuckerberg said back in late 2011, early 2012, you know, in the beginning of the Arab Spring. And it's interesting, actually, he was pretty cagey. I feel like there's this kind of like

false memory, I think we all have that he took credit for the Arab Spring. He didn't not take credit. Like, you know, there's this famous letter he wrote where he says that, you know, what Facebook is doing is helping to change how people relate to their government and to their social institutions. And this was that moment, obviously, where, you know, the Egyptian government had to shut down the entire internet to stop people from posting on Facebook. And I think that just the fact of the matter is a lot has changed in the last 10 years. And Facebook works a lot more closely with governments and probably would be a lot less comfortable casting themselves as a institution of social change. I mean, in the Israeli context, like Maya was talking about earlier, we know that, you know, there's whole units of kind of the

Israeli intelligence services whose job it is, is to feed into Facebook and kind of get Facebook to crack down on certain posters in the Palestinian territories. You know, there's all over the world, Facebook works hand in glove with those kinds of institutions. So yeah, I mean, it is really interesting to look a year back and see this notion that is Facebook something that changes how people relate to their government, like Zuckerberg said in 2012? Or is it really not so simple? Yeah, I think a lot of the activists across the region, you know, before I joined TRF, I was based in Iraq and Baghdad. And before that, I was based in Beirut, reporting primarily on Syria. And obviously, there were, you know, a range of protest movements in both of those countries during that time,

and also in my hometown in Beirut in 2019. I think activists across the region, in particular in the wake of the Arab Spring and the kind of the hopes that they had had during that time that have unfortunately not been fulfilled. I think they very much know that social media is not a silver bullet and it's not going to kind of be their savior. It's not going to be enough for them to wage the battles that they that they want to wage

for better rights they are choosing to organize on a range of platforms what's interesting is that those platforms are owned by facebook so they there's using you know whatsapp extensively to organize etc and last year you actually saw this huge shift it was end of last year beginning of this year as well you saw a shift from activists in the region away from WhatsApp because of a question about privacy and information sharing and onto Signal. And so they've moved on to Signal pretty widely across the region, as far as I can tell from the activists that I'm in touch with.

And that also coincided with their realization or their understanding that social media has actually become a battleground. It's not just a tool that they can use. It's a tool that governments, militias, other malign actors are also very much willing to use. You know, maybe we're thinking about elections or other kind of major world events. But there are, you know, on a much smaller scale, on the scale of Iraq, for example, there are different political parties and different armed groups, even in Iraq, quote, electronic armies. So politicians, armed groups that are linked to the state, armed groups not linked to the state, they have units whose entire job it is to go online, create fake accounts and start to harass activists, start to harass anybody, you know, rival politicians, whoever it might be. So these activists are very aware now that it can actually expose them to a certain amount of risk to be using these platforms to organize and to be vocal and are trying to find different ways to work

around that. I mean, one of the craziest stories on social media in the Middle East in the last couple of years was the like infiltration of Twitter headquarters by Saudi intelligence. I mean, I feel like that story, like, I don't know, it almost like didn't get enough attention. Like, it's clear that governments have identified these platforms as major battlegrounds, as Maya said, to the extent to which they are intelligence targets, right? I mean, Saudi intelligence had bribed a number of Twitter employees and placed moles inside the organization trying to identify anonymous users. I mean, yeah, it is a battleground in a real sense of the world. And so, yeah, inevitably, some of the most marginalized groups like, you know, LGBT Arabs, it's hard to win in this kind of world where there's all these forces are up against you and the company's attention is constantly getting drawn as businesses who can do them the most reputational harm,

what the threats to the bottom line. Unfortunately, the kind of communities that we've been reporting on don't have that power. I think that's a really good point to illustrate that, you know, these platforms have become battlegrounds where, you know, people might be trying to organize, but then they're also facing potential backlashes or these platforms can be used against them in really negative ways. I appreciate the insights that you've provided us on this topic. And I wanted to end by asking, is there any indication after your story that Facebook is going to change its content moderation practices on these conversion therapy posts in Arabic? And is there anything that you think that we missed in this conversation that is important to add as we close? I haven't gotten any indication that things are

going to change, but I'll let you know if we do hear. A number of the posts, the more egregious posts we reported on, you know, and flagged to Facebook were taken down, as we mentioned. But, you know, the actual conversion therapists themselves are still operating freely on Facebook. I haven't gotten any word that any new policies or new resources are going to be thrown at this issue at all. Likewise. Yeah, actually, I mean, I heard from digital rights groups in the region that they this is not an issue that had been on their radar. So, you know, they were up in arms, obviously, they were outraged about this. And they've added this to a list of other issues that they're going to be bringing up with with Facebook and other social media companies. But from Facebook's end, I mean,

the only thing that I can say is Facebook's like a human rights associate has friended me on LinkedIn. Like that's the biggest thing that I can that I can that I can mention. That's all I've got. Yeah, probably not any big changes coming from that one. Well, I really appreciate you both taking the time to come on the show to educate us about this really important issue. Avi, Maya, thank you so much. Thanks, Paris. Thanks, Paris. It was our pleasure. Avi Asher Shapiro is a journalist covering technology for the Thomson Reuters Foundation,

and Maya Jabali is the Middle East correspondent at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. You can follow Avi on Twitter at at AA Shapiro, and you can follow Maya at Reuters Foundation. You can follow Avi on Twitter at at A.A. Shapiro. And you can follow Maya at Jabali M. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks. And you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week,

you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.