For many, the Facebook Papers come as no surprise. As a Palestinian digital rights advocate, the recent revelations perfectly describe and validate the archetypal experience of Palestinians and millions of others generating daily content outside the U.S.

For years, activists and civil society organizations have warned of Facebook’s negligence of non-English speaking regions, and its deeply discriminatory content moderation structure which have served to silence globally marginalized voices, not empower them. Yet Facebook, at every ebb and flow, has chosen profit over people.

The thousands of pages of leaked documents now provide incontestable evidence, finally laying to rest one of the biggest claims repeatedly made by Facebook and its leadership since the heyday of the Arab Spring: Safety and freedom of expression are not afforded to all users equally, but are rather dictated by the company’s market interests and bottom line.

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