Facebook Wants to take down Hillel Neuer's Account "UN Watch"

 

The director of a pro-Israel watchdog group revealed on Monday that Facebook has threatened to delete his personal page after limiting many of his posts from public view, citing content that violates the social media platform’s terms of service. But the social media giant won’t elaborate on what it finds offensive about the account.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of the NGO UN Watch, which highlights bias against Israel at the United Nations, said Facebook sent him a notification warning that his personal page is “at risk of being unpublished” due to “continued Community Standards violations.”

However, the social media titan cited just one example of an “offensive” post published by Neuer, which featured an image of a Taliban gunman with a caption calling out Ben & Jerry’s for boycotting Judea and Samaria but not the terror group controlling Afghanistan.

Facebook said that post had earned Neuer a “strike” against his account, adding that the post had been partially hidden from public view – even from the tens of thousands of people who specifically follow him on the platform.

The platform also deleted the post, which he said had been shared on Twitter with no indication that the content violated community standards.

“It turns out that, as I suspected, Facebook has been deliberately and unjustifiably hiding my posts from the public,” Neuer said in a statement. “Now they’re arbitrarily threatening to delete my account. It’s a Kafkaesque situation, and makes absolutely no sense.”

It’s unclear whether Facebook moderators had actually reviewed the post and found it offensive, or if complaints lodged by people who didn’t like the content had automatically triggered the warning.

“It’s possible that this censorship was caused by individuals abusing those standards, acting in bad faith to orchestrate frivolous complaints, but whatever the reason, it needs to stop,” Neuer said.

In a letter to Facebook parent company Meta, UN Watch demanded that the platform “remove strikes against Hillel Neuer’s Facebook page, cease punitive measures, and take the necessary steps to ensure that bad faith actors can no longer trigger baseless actions against Neuer’s page.”

UN Watch has almost 170,000 followers on Facebook, and Neuer’s own page has 49,000 followers.