Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”

In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.

In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”