October 7 victims’ families sue Meta for streaming footage of murders and abductions

Families of people killed or abducted in the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, are suing Meta for over $1 billion for letting footage of the attacks play live on social media and then failing to remove it immediately.

Some of the terrorists who stormed southern Israel streamed the footage via victims’ phones onto the victims’ social media pages. The hours that passed until the footage was removed allowed it to be widely distributed.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says it takes down content that praises Hamas or October 7, and that “following the attacks, designated teams worked around the clock in real time to remove content that violates our policy.”

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The Tel Aviv District Court on Monday held a preliminary hearing on the class action lawsuit that was filed in August last year, and proposed the sides pursue mediation, according to Israel Hayom.

One of the plaintiffs, Mor Bayder, said in an interview broadcast by Channel 12 Thursday that she watched in real time on Facebook as her 74-year-old grandmother Bracha Levinson was murdered in her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.

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It took Meta several hours to block Levinson’s Facebook page, where the video played, and an entire day to remove the footage altogether, according to Channel 12.

“This isn’t some horror show. It’s not some movie. It’s my grandmother — my grandmother who’s being murdered,” Bayder told the network. “My grandmother can’t be brought back. Her case can’t be changed anymore… but going forward they should draw conclusions, learn, upgrade, admit responsibility and apply it to all users.”

Other plaintiffs include the family of Tsachi Idan, who was killed in captivity after terrorists stormed his Kibbutz Nahal Oz home and murdered his daughter Maayan while livestreaming the attack on his wife’s Facebook account; and Stav Arava, who watched on his mother Dikla’s Facebook page as she, his brother Tomer and Dikla’s partner Noam Elyakim were murdered and Noam’s young daughters Dafna and Ela were abducted, also in Nahal Oz.

The plaintiffs also include hostages and their families whose identities are sealed, as well as Israeli social media users who were exposed to the livestreams.

Plaintiffs demand Meta pay NIS 200,000 ($64,335) to every relative or close friend exposed to a livestream of a victim’s death, and NIS 20,000 for every Israeli social media user exposed to such content on Meta’s platforms.

Dana Shahar Yanai, who is representing the class of Israeli social media users in the lawsuit, told Israel Hayom this week that Meta not only failed to prevent the livestreams, “it even made a profit from the traffic that day.”

On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the Gaza war.

The lawsuit filed last year said images broadcast on Meta’s platforms that day “will forever be seared in the memory of the family members and of much of the public as the final moments of their loved ones.”

“Every day Meta keeps distributing the horrors, the terror attack continues against the victims and their families,” the lawsuit said. “Facebook and Instagram served as an inseparable part of Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure, and serve as infrastructure for the distribution of terrorism to this day.”

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