"Earlier this week, many of our Instagram users faced significant issues accessing certain hashtags and content - including our Palestinian community. We sincerely apologize for the frustration this has caused and assure you that we were in no way trying to limit anyone's ability to freely express themselves," the statement read.
A spokeswoman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, referred Newsweek to Thursday (May 6) tweets by Instagram reporting a "widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic."
"We're sorry to all impacted, especially those raising awareness for important causes globally," Instagram tweeted after announcing the issue had been fixed.
Removed content
Hundreds of social-media users have accused Instagram and Facebook of removing content and accounts reporting on the Sheikh Jarrah violence.
One of the videos deleted from the story archives of Palestinian journalist Maha Rezeq was about Israeli settler Jacob, who took over the house of Muna El-Kurd in 2009. He told her that if he did not steal her house then someone else would.
"What I've been sharing is raw footage, videos, testimonies of people on the ground, some are actually coming from the mouth of an Israeli, the mouth of a settler, why is that controversial? Everything was self-explanatory, there is no blood or graphic footage that violates the community standard," Rezeq said.
Rezeq told Arab News that only her content on Sheikh Jarrah was removed. "The only thing that was removed from my archive were stories and posts related to exposing Israeli crimes against Palestinians."
Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer from Jerusalem, was posting videos and stories on violence in Sheikh Jarrah when he received a warning that his account might be deleted.
"Some of your previous posts didn't follow our Community Guidelines," the message read. "If you post something that goes against our guidelines again, your account may be deleted, including your posts, archive, messages and followers."
Facebook also removed "57 pieces of content" from his page because they went against the guidelines.
Yasmin Dabat said her stories with the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, dated to May 3, were "removed by Instagram without any warnings or updates."
Nadim Nashif, the director of a nonprofit organization called 7amleh that advocates for Palestinian digital rights, said the censorship of Palestinians happened through two channels.
"One factor is what the Israelis are doing, they are basically trying to push the social-media platforms to adopt their own standards of what should be there and what shouldn't be there. There's strong cooperation between them and Facebook mainly."
According to Nashif, this leads to what's called "voluntary takedowns," where Israeli cyber units send requests to social-media platforms to take down specific content without a court order.
Palestinians are also being silenced on social media through the use of Artificial Intelligence by those platforms to identify what content violates their user guidelines. "Social-media platforms are (using) artificial intelligence for takedowns and there is lots of use of keywords, mainly around what the US government consider(s) as terrorist organizations," Nashif explained.
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