Facebook has set up a 24-hour ‘special operations center’ to monitor content on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to a Reuters report, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, told reporters on a conference call: ‘This operations center allows us to closely monitor the situation so we can remove content that violates our community standards faster, while also addressing possible errors in enforcement.’
Misinformation, hate speech and calls for violence about the conflict have circulated on social media platforms amid the deadly fighting, Reuters said.
The report noted that a Reuters fact-checking team ‘has debunked images shared on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that falsely claim to be related to the conflict’.
It also cited a WhatsApp spokesman as saying: ‘As a private messaging service, we do not have access to the contents of people’s personal chats though when information is reported to us, we take action to ban accounts we believe may be involved in causing imminent harm.
‘We also quickly respond to valid legal requests from law enforcement for the limited information available to us.’