Technology team Meta has apologised for adding “terrorist” to the biographies of some Instagram users describing themselves as Palestinian. Meta said it fixed a problem “that briefly caused inappropriate Arabic translations” in some of its products. “We sincerely apologise that this happened,” it told the BBC. The platform has also faced accusations of suppressing content voicing support for Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza conflict. Some users say they have been “shadow banned” on Instagram over pro-Palestinian posts. This is when a platform intervenes to make sure posts do not appear in other people’s feeds. The users claim 24-hour posts on Stories referencing the conflict have had fewer views than others and that their accounts cannot be found as easily in search. The tech giant acknowledged a bug had affected Stories but said it had nothing to do with subject matter. This followed posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok by Instagram user @khanman1996 on Sunday which drew attention to the translation error and documented it happening in a screen recording. He had written in his bio that he was Palestinian, followed by a Palestinian flag and the word “alhamdulillah” in Arabic – which translates to “praise be to God” in English. However, upon clicking “see translation”, viewers were given an English translation reading: “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom”. @khanman1996 said in his posts he was not Palestinian himself but had tested the error out after being told about it by an unnamed Palestinian friend. He said in a video posted after Instagram fixed the issue that the glitch had been up for at least three hours, adding that “to me personally, the fact that it was up at all was insane”. Shadow-banning claims Shadow banning is when online services limit the reach or visibility of an account or its content to other users, usually if it falls foul of their guidelines. Instagram released a transparency tool in late 2022 that lets users see whether any restrictions have been placed on their account that might prevent their posts from being recommended to other users.
via bbc: Instagram sorry for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user bios