Bella Hadid gets apology from Instagram after platform removed photo of father's passport
Instagram has apologised to Bella Hadid after removing a post celebrating her father's Palestinian identity.
On Tuesday, the model shared an Instagram Story with her 31.4m followers that showed Mohammed Hadid’s passport photo alongside the caption: “I am proud to be Palestinian”.
Hadid added: “Everyone should post where their mother and fathers were born today! Remind them how proud you are of where you come from!”
The model later revealed in a subsequent post that her Story had been taken down because it went against the platform’s community guidelines.
Hadid criticised the platform and asked "what part of me being proud of my fathers birth place of Palestine is ‘bullying, harassment, graphic, or sexual nudity’?"
“Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram?” she added.
Now, Instagram has confirmed that it has apologised to Hadid for wrongly taking the post down.
A spokesperson for Facebook – which owns Instagram – explained that they don’t allow private information, such as passport numbers, to be posted on the platform.
Although, they added Bella’s post shouldn’t have been taken down because the passport number was blurred out.
"To protect the privacy of our community, we don’t allow people to post personal information, such as passport numbers, on Instagram," a spokesperson said.
"In this case, the passport number was blurred out, so this content shouldn’t have been removed. ‘We’ve restored the content and apologised to Bella for the mistake."
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