Human Rights Watch accused Facebook/Instagram of bias against support for Palestinians, in its moderation of postings. It said the company fails to follow its rules and the result is systematic bias.

The company replied that it attempts to apply its rules even-handedly but it is not straightforward to do so.

Since the combat in Gaza is asymmetrical, it is not surprising that applying one set of rules to supporters of both sides, as even-handedly as a human can be, could lead to a biased result.

For instance, Israel's massacres often result from systematic carelessness. In one case, it led to Israeli troops killing three escaped Israeli hostages. Surely the soldiers did not specifically wish those hostages dead; but their "this has to be a trap" mindset predisposed them to killing anyone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fog of war did the rest. All that would apply to each of the 2 million Palestinian civilians, just as it would to the occasional escaped hostage.

I can imagine that Facebook/Instagram moderators look at a video of civilians killed by Israel's bombardment and calling that a "massacre", and rejecting that claim as false on the grounds that there was no sign of a specific intention to kill Palestinian civilians at that moment. At what point does adoption of a policy that leads to indiscriminate killing of civilians become tantamount to a decision to kill civilians?

It is true that 1,000 examples of postings allegedly handled wrong is a minuscule fraction of the postings that are made. On the other hand, to check that many examples is a large task. Facebook/Instagram has the money to check far more than that; Human Rights Watch does not.

I have an idea for a way of evaluating whether the moderation system, over all, is biased. First, randomly choose N instances of postings accused of being unfair to Israel, and N instances of postings accused of being unfair to Palestine. Then study what the moderation system did with each one, and deduce from those examples what the real moderation system does in actual practice. What are its real, practical rules and real, practical criteria?

Those conclusions about how the moderation system actually works would provide a basis to judge whether that system is fair in practice — and provide specific recommendations to improve it, if not.