Photo and video sharing platform Instagram said Sunday that it has revised its algorithm following complaints by employees that pro-Palestinian content could not be properly viewed by users during May's hostilities between Israel and Hamas.
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According to The Verge, Instagram usually highlights original content in its stories feature before reposted content, but will now begin to give equal weighting to both.
Reports by BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times said last week that a group of Instagram employees had alerted the company's management to concerns that content was being censored by Instagram's automated moderation, during the 11-day conflict, which saw Gaza Strip-based terrorist fire over 4,000 rockets on southern and central and Israel, while the Israeli Air Force pummeled Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in the coastal enclave.
According to the Financial Times the employees who complained said that while they did not think the censorship was deliberate, "moderating at scale is biased against any marginalized groups."
Instagram is owned by Facebook. A spokesperson for the social media giant told The Verge that the change to the algorithm was "not only in response to concerns over pro-Palestinian content" but more due the fact that the company realized that "the way the app functioned – bubbling up posts that it believes its users care about most – led people to believe it was suppressing certain points of view or topics.
"We want to be really clear – this isn't the case," the Facebook official said. "This applied to any post, no matter what it's about."
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