Meta, which owns Instagram, on Wednesday said that it detected a possible attack to hack a pro-Palestinian account with a massive following and the company had locked it while trying to contact the owner.
The account @eye.on.palestine which had over 6 million followers on Instagram went dark on Wednesday. A backup account, @eye.on.palestine2, was also unavailable Wednesday, as were a related Facebook account and a Threads account. When they were visited Wednesday, the Instagram pages returned the message: “Sorry, this page isn’t available.”
The account focused on footage from Gaza, which recorded the civilian casualties and injuries caused by Israeli airstrikes in the strip. In May 2023, the administrators of the page had shared on their Telegram account that they received a warning from Instagram that a "government-backed hacker" is trying to take the page down.
Some pro-Palestinian accounts with fewer followers were also unavailable. “These accounts were initially locked for security reasons after signs of compromise, and we’re working to make contact with the account owners to ensure they have access,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”
On X, formerly known as Twitter, the account @EyeonPalestine was listed as no longer being in existence. It wasn’t clear when the account disappeared.
Instagram has been accused of censoring pro-Palestine accounts, with many users claiming that the platform has been "shadow-banning" them for posts supporting Palestinians. Shadow banning is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user.
Authors, activists, journalists, filmmakers and other Instagram users around the world have said posts mentioning hashtags like “FreePalestine” and “IStandWithPalestine” as well as messages expressing solidarity with Palestinians are being hidden by the platform.
Users have also accused Instagram of taking down posts which depict the violence in Gaza citing violation of “community guidelines”.
Meta spokesperson Stone had posted on X that a bug was impacting the reach of certain posts and it had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content.
The war, in its 19th day, is the deadliest of five conflicts in Gaza.
More than 1,400 people in Israel were killed during the initial Hamas attack. In addition, 222 hostages were abducted by Hamas militants.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry said that at least 6,546 Palestinians have been killed and 17,439 others wounded.