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FIRST ON FOX — At least a dozen Republican state attorneys general from across the United States signed a letter to Meta Platforms Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead demanding answers on the company’s actions following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel.
“We, the 12 undersigned Attorneys General, write to express our serious concerns over recent allegations regarding Meta’s actions following the October 7, 2023, massacre and terrorist attack in Israel,” the letter, sent to Meta a day after the two-year anniversary of the attacks, said.
The attorneys general are calling on Newstead to provide Meta’s latest policy on depictions of violence and incitement, as well as any other relevant policies. Newstead is also requested to describe “remedial efforts,” if any, that Meta made after the Oct. 7 attacks. Additionally, the attorneys general asked Newstead to detail any other steps Meta has taken to prevent illegal violence from being displayed on its platforms.
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The attorneys general asked Newstead to provide a response to the letter by Nov. 10, 2025.
The attorneys general who signed the letter are Alan Wilson of South Carolina, Brenna Bird of Iowa, Steve Marshall of Alabama, Tim Griffin of Arkansas, James Uthmeier of Florida, Todd Rokita of Indiana, Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma, Catherine Hanaway of Missouri, Austin Knudsen of Montana, Mike Hilgers of Nebraska, Marty Jackley of South Dakota, and Ken Paxton of Texas.
Meta’s current policy — which has been changed multiple times since the attacks — says it removes “threats of violence against various targets” and defines threats of violence as “statements or visuals representing an intention, aspiration, or call for violence against a target, and threats can be expressed in various types of statements such as statements of intent, calls for action, advocacy, expressions of hope, aspirational statements and conditional statements.”
Additionally, Meta says on its website that it protects users from “depictions of kidnappings or abductions” and depictions of “high-severity or mid-severity violence.”
“Hamas is banned from our platforms, and we remove content that supports and glorifies them and the terrorist attacks on October 7th,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to FOX Business. “Following the attacks, we formed dedicated teams that worked around the clock to address and remove content that violates our policies, while ensuring our platforms can still be used to condemn Hamas and raise awareness of their victims and the hostages still being held in Gaza.”
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The Meta spokesperson also noted that the company established a special operations center after the fact that included fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers who could monitor the situation in real time, allowing sensitive content to be removed faster. The spokesperson said that in the three days following the attacks, the company removed or marked as disturbing over 795,000 pieces of content that violated its policies.
The letter comes after families of Oct. 7 victims filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Meta, claiming the company’s platforms played a role in the distribution of video showing the atrocities.
In the suit, victims’ loved ones claim that Meta knowingly enabled the distribution of live and recorded video of atrocities, such as murder and hostage-taking, according to CTech, an Israeli technology news outlet. The plaintiffs say that this turned Facebook and Instagram into “an integral part of the terrorist attack on Israel,” CTech added.
“If the plaintiff-victims’ allegations are true, it is hard to see how Meta has met its own standards,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter to Newstead.
One of the plaintiffs is Mor Baider, who saw the horrific video of her grandmother’s murder on Facebook after desperately trying to reach her, according to CTech. The outlet said that after failing to reach her grandmother, Bracha Levinson, who was a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, Baider looked on social media for answers. She instead found the violent video on the platform.
“For many hours, in real time and long after the terrorist attack, horrific documentation from the attack (to put it mildly) was disseminated, showing innocent civilians — children, elderly, women, and men — subjected to atrocities that even paper cannot bear to describe,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote, according to CTech.
The Idan family, which is also included in the lawsuit, claims that the murder of 22-year-old Maayan Idan and the kidnapping of her father, Tsachi, were live-streamed on Facebook, according to CTech, which noted that Tsachi was later killed in captivity.
FOX Business reached out to a law firm representing the plaintiffs for comment.
