After pro-Palestinian protesters coordinated an attempt to tank ratings due to censorship of Palestinian content, Apple declined a request from Facebook to delete negative reviews from the App store.
In the App Store, the Facebook app earned a 2.3 out of five-star rating, down from more than four stars last week. One-star reviews account for the majority of ratings, with many users claiming that their rating is due to Facebook’s censorship of hashtags.
“With the recent escalations between Israel and Palestine, user trust is falling significantly,” one senior software engineer wrote on Facebook’s internal message board. “Our customers are dissatisfied with how we handled the situation. Users believe they are being filtered, having their content distributed in a small way, and eventually being silenced. As a result, our users have begun to demonstrate by abandoning 1 star reviews.”
