from State Of The Nation:
Jordana Cutler, a long-time senior Israeli government official who advised Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, was hired by Meta to be their “Jewish Diaspora” policy chief and uses her position to “demand censorship of Israel’s critics.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
NEW: I’ve reviewed internal Meta records that show the company’s dedicated liaison to the Israeli government has repeatedly tried to censor Instagram posts belonging to pro-Palestinian student protest groups and other content related to the war https://t.co/jHq4xXBVEd
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) October 21, 2024
A long-time senior Israeli government official and Netanyahu/Liduk adviser, Jordana Cutler, is now the chief of Facebook’s US censorship unit on Israel and Palestine.
She repeatedly and aggressively uses that position to demand censorship of Israel critics: https://t.co/5gKdEl2htv
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 21, 2024
Facebook’s “Jewish Diaspora” chief Jordana Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor “hate speech” that “makes Jewish people feel unsafe.”
She says Meta banned “harmful stereotypes like ‘Jews run the world'” as “hate speech” after consulting w/ World Jewish Congress. pic.twitter.com/d6bD8vMa3o
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) October 22, 2024
From The Intercept, “Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts”:
A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.”
It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.
Meta banned the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine from Instagram in August.
[…] Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.” In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”
Cutler did not respond to a request for comment; Meta declined a request to interview her.
Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.
“Voice of the Government”
Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resume includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”
In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.
In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”
A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.” In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.” In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”
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