Facebook Dragged Into Tussle By Pro-Palestinian Activists

A social media campaign by pro-Palestine activists has pushed down the ranking for Facebook’s app in Apple and Google’s app stores. The activists are seeking to protest Facebook’s alleged censorship of Palestinian accounts on its platform, and are instructing people to leave Facebook’s app a one-star review.

Facebook is treating the situation as a high-priority issue internally; one software engineer wrote in a post on an internal Facebook message board that “users are upset with our handling of the situation,” adding that the users “have started protesting by leaving 1-star reviews.” Facebook has reached out to have the reviews removed, but so far, Apple has declined the request to remove the reviews.

The rating for Facebook’s iOS app on the App Store as of Monday morning afternoon was 3 stars out of 5, with 1-star ratings far outpacing others. In the Google Play store the situation was similar; the Android Facebook app had a slightly higher 2.4 rating, with the majority of the reviews 1-star.

This comes at a time when the power of social media has often been heralded as a silver lining in how the world views events. It is known that social media usually influences, or changes perspectives around issues facing society. As it is known, with great power comes great responsibility, how will social media giants continue to live up to objectivity in times of unpredictable strife, we will just have to see.