Statement on Meta's Wrongful Termination of Ferras Hamad

Dear Meta Leadership,

This letter is in response to the wrongful termination of our colleague Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been on Meta's machine learning team since 2022. 

We, Meta employees, wish to express our unequivocal support for Ferras Hamad’s brave and principled stance against Meta’s selective and discriminatory enforcement of workplace policies. 

Ferras was investigating the misclassification of journalist Motaz Azaiza’s posts of images from Gaza as “pornographic content”. Although Ferras’s manager clearly stated that investigating this issue was within his job function, he was ultimately fired for doing his job. Meta justified his termination by invoking the User Data Access Policy, despite the lack of personal connection between Ferras and Motaz.   

This erroneous response is not an isolated incident. Meta’s Community Engagement Expectations (CEE) limit discussions that could lead to “disruption” in the workplace, but they explicitly encourage employees to raise feedback about our products and policies. Each time leadership has been presented with product and policy issues that disproportionately impact Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities, they have dismissed them as standalone issues, rather than a systemic pattern of biases powering Meta’s products. Leadership did not support or resource solutions to these problems, despite being on notice of them on multiple occasions including via an extensive report from Human Rights Watch. The few improvements that were achieved required independent appeals to product teams with minimal Meta leadership support. Oversight and support which would be forthright if the Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities were even close to company priorities.

At the same time, numerous employees that have requested support, expressed solidarity or even tried to surface and fix issues via established channels have been put on investigative leave, taken mental health reprieve, or been disciplined for alleged CEE violations. 

In this context, Hamad’s firing cannot be dismissed as an isolated instance of an alleged “data misuse” violation. Instead, his termination is a continuation of Meta’s systemic censorship and suppression of Palestinian voices as well as clear discrimination against its Palestinian community and retaliation against Ferras in particular. 

The company that constantly touts its diversity is now facing intense reputational damage. This marks the 3rd letter that Palestinian employees and allies have directed to Meta leadership to cite concerns over product issues and workplace discrimination. We have been met with deafening silence. Meta’s leadership has not been bold, open, nor moved fast (or at all) on the documented, actionable, and damaging impact of pervasive workplace discrimination. Meta’s leadership is actively fostering a hostile work environment. 

We are grateful to Ferras for revealing these discriminatory policies to the world. In demonstrating a consistent bias against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities at Meta and in our user base, Meta’s leadership is actively working against the interest of its shareholders by damaging its reputation. 

In addition to the three demands from our previous letter, we demand that Meta cease its retaliation against workers who are embodying the motto “nothing is somebody else’s problem” by investigating and raising damaging product issues. We demand that Meta cease systematically silencing Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab voices.