Facebook's PR crisis Marked by its rating drop across all stores

By: Mohammad Azmi Ahmad Hamaydeh

On 23 May 2021, after weeks of Facebooks censorship towards pro-Palestinian posts, a group of Palestinian activists initiated a media campaign to change the app’s rating on both IOS and Google platforms by instructing people to rate the app a one-star across the platforms, dropping the rating to 1.5 on IOS and to 1.9 on Google stores.

The actions of Facebook in light of the recent events occurring in Palestine have sparked public outrage, millions from around the world are condemning Facebook for trying to suppress the events occurring in Palestine, with many of the users receiving notifications, stating that their posts were “removed due to harmful content”.

The situation became a lot more dire when Facebook reached out to both Apple and Google in order to remove all reviews from their stores, but so far, Google has not provided any responses and Apple immediately declined to hide, or remove any of the reviews published on the IOS store.

Source: Facebook app logo

Via: American Civil Liberties Union

A spokesperson from Facebook revealed that the issue is being dealt with and is marked as a high priority issue.

Another Facebook engineer published on his private Facebook page, “Users are upset with our handling of the situation, users are now protesting by leaving one-star reviews”.

This gave absolutely no indication that the company was working towards a solution.

On the other hand, protesters continue to campaign and drop the ratings of the app, a user under the name of Ahmad Zuhir stated, “Facebook is complicit in the censorship of posts raising awareness about the ongoing Israeli war crimes and occupation of Palestine.”

Another user by the name of Janshcu states in his review, “Shame on you FB for being the corrupt company you are! Allowing governments to control what content is created on a platform which is supposed to allow freedom of speech for everyone and not just when it suits them.”

The company thus far has not provided a viable solution but rather turned to blame a glitch in moderation algorithms for removal, with the supposed glitch still not fixed; we still see posts being removed to this day.

While another spokesperson from Facebook told NBS news, “We have a team of Arabic and Hebrew speakers that are ensuring no harmful content is being posted on the platform.”